Aug 29th, 2007
Have you seen the trends away from newstands to home delivery of magazines
Subscribing to a magazine has become the preferred way of getting the magazine of your choice delivered at your home instead of picking up magazines at a newsstand. You can now get any magazine without venturing out from home. Almost all publications have their subscription services in place and this contributes a large chunk of their revenue. Subscription sales is the life-blood of those magazines which do not heavily rely upon advertising revenue. Even those magazines which rely upon advertising, use a subscription strategy to increase circulation, that in turn attracts advertisers.
There are many Portals which facilitate the subscription services. These Portals are so convenient that almost any magazine of any category of any kind are listed there and can be subscribed online. Anyone from any part of the world can access these portals and avail the subscription services of his choice. There are various means which are applied to make subscription more and more compelling and attractive. Discount Coupons, redeemable at a later date is a very old practice,so new features are being added to it. The world has become a virtual global village and the physical or geographical boundaries has become irrelevant in this Internet age.
Publishers are experimenting with innovative ideas nowadays to reach out to new potential readers. Newsstands sales are no longer viable to the publications which target to reach out to every part of the world. Even the magazines with a localised content for a specific country are trying various subscription options as an effective marketing tool. There is competition among Publishers to make their subscription services more attractive than others. Not only heavy discounts are offered but also various lucky draws coupled with gift items are given to make the subscription offer compelling. These are also a very effective measures to retain the existing subscribers.
There is an inherent advantage with the subscription services over the traditional news stand sales methods. It allows the publishers to save approximately forty percent cost which are distributed among the distributes and retailers in the conventional news stands sale format. Contrary to the general perception that the magazine subscriptions would be affected due to the ever increasing popularity of Blogs and Online Journals,the circulation of magazines with relevant and original content has increased significantly. There are various Magazines,especially academic Journals which targets libraries of all kinds - public, private, educational and institutional. Glossy magazines primarily target reception areas where people flick through them. The content of these kinds of magazines are lighter in nature.
Now its very easy to get any magazine’s subscription with the click of a mouse in a relatively less developed country also. Any person can avail this service in any part of the world. It is great to notice that many publishers fulfil their social responsibilities and offer heavy discount to their students readers. In a country like India with a huge literate population, subscribing to various prestigious magazines published from USA has become a norm. These were non-existent a decade earlier. Online Subscription services has transformed the whole scenario now.
From the serious to the whimiscal; Texas Monthly, gives the native Texan as well as the Texan at heart, the news and events of the lone star state.